Some of those elements can be heard in everything from tribal chants to electronic dance music. Layers of repeated material, whether in rounds or other harmonic patterns, are heard in almost every culture.
Which brings us to Maarja Nuut … That BBC Minimalism definition fits Nuut’s music, if you consider that hers are basically four-minute folk songs at their core.
This 33-year-old Estonian fiddler, singer, and looper weaves chantlike pieces that often seem without clearly defined beginning or end. After training in classical violin, Nuut spent time in India studying Hindustani music before returning to Estonia to immerse herself into the village music of northern Europe. Her studies of traditional village music at the Viljandi Culture Academy in Estonia collided with current tech trends all around her, a genre-rattling collision of old 78 rpm field recordings and her discovery of looping equipment. In an interview with FaceCulture, she says “the looper was one of the triggers for me.”
Her fiddling reminds us the violin was the peasant dance instrument of choice, and its looped layers create a dense texture and rhythmic pulse. When she strums her violin, she evokes the countless gut string instruments strummed around campfires for eons. The looper lets her sing in a timeless call-and-response.
At times she sings with the soothing lilt of a lullaby. At times she sings with that sharp, forward-projected style we associate with the Balkans, the antithesis of the plummy, round sound of bel canto. It’s hard to track down all of her lyrics in translation, but these songs have very old roots. They tend to be about wildlife and farm chores and the night sky, but the effect is often anything but pastoral. She says her lyrics are all traditional, based in nature and legend, usually metaphorical and often grim. “They’ve been filtered through so many generations, there’s an essence, you can’t make them better.”
Her approach to looping can make the seemingly static intriguingly complex. She unconsciously developed numeric systems for her layers of loops, patterns she discovered when reviewing her work for a lecture. She will, for instance, loop 13 beats of violin over 21 beats of violin, then sing 6-beat lines over them. It was this irregular rhythmic unity that made me hear the sounds of Africa in this Estonian performer at first exposure.
Consider: Nuut’s Jaa-ti-daa and Malian singer Rokia Traore’s Laidu. These musicians’ entire first albums seem so similar to me in texture, tempos and effect.
The other intriguing appeal of Nuut’s looping is her kinship with jazz composers in the belief her work can be both composed and fluid. When describing “Une Meeles,” her 2016 first album, she calls the tracks “the documentation of a certain moment in time.” For each piece, change one beat in the loop and shifts can become profound, and each performance is a continuation, a variation on a theme. Just compare this live performance of Hobusemäng (The Horse Game) with the studio recording.
This isn’t just a result of looping vagaries, it reflects her attitude – so similar to Bartók and other nationalists of the early 20th century – that traditional sounds inform, not control, the contemporary. “If you take something from the traditional, from archives, it’s fixed documentation, a fixed form of something,” Nuut says. “It’s sort of dead. I wanted to learn the musical vocabulary, the musical language, so hopefully I can start speaking myself.”
On her second album, the 2018 “Muunduja,” she teamed with Estonian sound sampler Hendrik Kaljujärv (aka Ruum) who makes his own field recordings of ambient sounds for sampling. The album’s sound pallet is more expansive, less obviously village-based, often more soulful and direct. The effect of adding a beat and electronic layers at times sounds remarkably like Argentinian Juana Moliana. Molina followers should give a listen to the album’s first track, Haned kuadunud.
Nuut’s music is immediately engaging, but so far, of limited scope. She is aiming for small things – and hitting her target. Her inventiveness rooted in traditions heard on her first two discs seems fertile ground for future compositions. There are many creative options for her: She can stay on the traditional music circuit, she can go long-form, or she could evolve into Estonia’s answer to Björk. Not all of her influences are locked away in field recordings. What’s next could be great.
